Five-factor model of personality

Five-factor model of personality, in psychology, a model of an individual’s personality that divides it into five traits. Personality traits are understood as patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour that are relatively enduring across an individual’s life span.

The traits that constitute the five-factor model are extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Extraversion, sometimes referred to as surgency, is indicated by assertive, energetic, and gregarious behaviours. Neuroticism is essentially equivalent to emotional instability and can be seen in irritable and moody behaviours. Openness to experience, sometimes referred to as intellect, indicates an individual’s inquisitiveness, thoughtfulness, and propensity for intellectually challenging tasks. Agreeableness is indicated in empathic, sympathetic, and kind behaviours. Finally, conscientiousness refers to an individual’s sense of responsibility and duty as well as foresight.

The five-factor model was developed in the 1980s and ’90s largely on the basis of the lexical hypothesis, which suggested that the fundamental traits of human personality have, over time, become encoded in language. According to this hypothesis, the task of the personality psychologist is to cull the essential traits of personality from the thousands of adjectives found in language that distinguish people according to their behavioral dispositions. The lexical hypothesis can be traced to the 1930s, and the advent of multiple-factor analysis (a statistical method for explaining individual differences in a range of observed attributes in terms of differences in a smaller number of unobserved, or latent, attributes) in the same decade provided an empirical method for culling these verbal descriptions. In the second half of the 20th century, personality psychologists in fact relied primarily on factor analysis to discover and validate many of their trait theories. A large number of personality psychologists concluded that the five-factor model represented the most successful outcome of these efforts.

Three lines of research have provided support for the validity of the five-factor model. First and foremost, the five factors have consistently emerged from factor analyses conducted on numerous data sets composed of descriptive trait terms from a number of languages, including English, Chinese, and German. Second, twin and adoption studies have revealed a substantial genetic component to the five factors. Third, the five factors have been applied across the human life span. For instance, studies have shown that children use the five factors when freely describing themselves and others, and parents’ natural-language descriptions of their children can be classified according to the five factors. Individuals’ relative standings on the five factors have also been shown to be fairly stable across much of the adult life span. More-recent efforts have sought to explicitly treat the five factors as temperaments that are present from birth, thus placing the five-factor model squarely in a developmental context.

Despite all of its success, the five-factor model has been roundly criticized by a number of scholars. One issue concerns the absence of a comprehensive theory. The lexical hypothesis, while intriguing and rational, is regarded by some scholars as far too narrow to qualify as a theory of personality. A related issue concerns the generic nature of the factors, which are allegedly too broad to provide a sufficiently rich understanding of human personality. Critics have also raised important methodological concerns, which have revolved around the use of factor analysis as the primary tool of discovery and validation for the five-factor method. Finally, disagreements among trait theorists have also been prominent in the literature. Some researchers have argued that three traits are sufficient: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism (marked by egocentric, cold, and impulsive behaviours). Others have argued that a larger number of traits are needed to provide a comprehensive taxonomy.

The five-factor model will nonetheless likely continue into the foreseeable future as a popular trait model of human personality. The five factors have proved extremely useful to researchers and practitioners in a variety of areas, such as the social, clinical, and industrial-organizational domains. The model has unquestionably generated a great deal of research and discussion, and it has played an important role in revitalizing the discipline of personality psychology.